Timothy Hallinan’s mysteries and thrillers have made numerous Top Ten Lists for their imaginative verve and humor – and his latest release Nighttown – No 7 in the Junior Bender series, is no exception.

Hi there I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today Tim talks about he’s how an LA burglar came to star in a series which proves bad guys have the most fun, and why writing is better than the best job ever.

Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

Why writing is more fun than working with Hollywood icon Katarine Hepburn

The amazing street kid behind the Poke Raffery series

How 'getting a heap of useless degrees' finally paid off

The new Golden Age of crime fiction is here now

The writers he admires most - and they're mostly women

What he'd do differently second time around

Where to find Timothy Hallinan:

Website: http://www.timothyhallinan.com

 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tim.hallinan.1

 Twitter: https://twitter.com/timhallinan

What follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

Jenny: Hello there Tim and welcome to the show, it's great to have you with us.

Timothy: Thanks, it's a real pleasure to be here.

Author Timothy Hallinan

Jenny: Now Tim, before we even dive into the questions, I know you've just had a week away at Joshua's Tree having a sort of personal style writing retreat. That seems to me totally romantic, I just love the idea of doing that. How did that week go?

Timothy: It went amazingly well. I live a fiction in which I will never complete the book I'm working on even though I've written 21 or 22 of them. When I get completely blocked, I go up there and I walk around in the desert for 2-3 days. Everything just melts, and there I am again with the story and the characters. And it worked this time yet again, for probably the twentieth time.

Jenny: That's just wonderful. Is there a certain point in a book where you get stuck every time, or is it different with each book?

Timothy: I get stuck over and over again, but usually the big crisis is about a third of the way in. I've actually thrown out half a dozen books because I just couldn't push past the block.

 Jenny: Wow that's interesting. To get ourselves launched here, how did you get started?  Was there a 'Once Upon a Time' moment when you thought I've just got to write fiction?  And if so, what was the catalyst for it?

Timothy: It was actually a "Twice Upon A Time" situation. We moved all the time when I was a kid. I'd lived in 22 houses by the time I was 18 years old. What that meant was I had no on-going friendships. I mean, you could move six blocks and you're in a different school. For a kid, it might as well be a different planet.

So what I did was, I read. I read all the time. When I was 11, I read The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. I understand how the story works - it's something secret, and somebody has to figure out how it works. Somebody has to restore order. About a year and a half after that, in my family's house in Tarzana,  on the old estate of Edgar Rice Burrough's, I read Gone With The Wind.

For the first time in my life, I read characters who were more real to me than the people with whom I lived. In fact, my mother said that she had to come up and call me sometimes, two or three times, and she had to literally put her hand over the page of the book before I could tune into her.

So by the time I was maybe 13, I understood that there was a kind of story I wanted to tell. And I understood that the most important part of any story were the characters. That was sort of the basis on which everything ...